"Hot on the heals of Oracle's revamp of Solaris support, the licensing agreement for free downloads of Solaris 10 have changed. Here is the bit in question: "...Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software". So far the OpenSolaris license has not changed, it's still CDDL."

I had linux and bsd servers with super high loads mostly used for lamp, web loadbalancers and they do just as well.

The only reason why Solaris, AIX still has market because some mission critical systems are built with them and they provide abilities such as hotswapping cpus,memory etc. or keep running in case of kernel panic.

I never had to work with solaris more than install and maintain it but my opinion is that its a major crap system and all the pros I heard from people like you is exactly like this.
80% of the ISPs use solaris, for what?
Asterisk works better on solaris, orly?
Write down a list of 10 applications which really scales better on it. I think you couldn't because those are all inhouse developed applications what you never heard of.

Top-notch documentation - try finding that for Linux. Or Windows, although acceptable Windows docs are usually available. I'm not familiar enough with OS X docs to know how good they are, though.

Boot environments - hose your configuration? Just boot into an older BE, and it's just like it was before.

Sane memory management - this is primarily a knock on Linux, but... it doesn't allocate memory that doesn't exist, unlike Linux. (That's not to say it doesn't allocate over the actual system RAM, it will, but only up to RAM+swap. Linux will allocate more than RAM+swap.)

I have to agree with you on the documentation while at the same time disagreeing. There are many aspects of Solaris which are really well documented. There are other sections which are more 'application' or 'daemon' specific which are very poorly documented.

The core operating system is great for docs, the additional services sometimes leave something to be desired.

I do. For my fileserver/VM box.
ZFS
Dtrace (though haven't used yet)
Containers - runs both OpenSolaris and linux (little overhead). So easy to setup, and VERY powerful
ZFS - yep, twice
Very good Virtualbox support - it runs my VMs. Also allows for xVM(Xen) support - also in Linux
Crossbow Networking
Performance - yep, look at the latest OpenSolaris numbers compared to Linux AND FreeBSD..

Trying out both Linux and Freebsd for my fileserver, but I switched back immediately. I use Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Windows on OTHER hardware, but for my fileserver and VM machine, I haven't found anything comparable to OpenSolaris.

Trying out both Linux and Freebsd for my fileserver, but I switched back immediately. I use Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Windows on OTHER hardware, but for my fileserver and VM machine, I haven't found anything comparable to OpenSolaris.

....and you do not congest the network with all those pesky security updates....